6 Quotes by Zia Mohyeddin

Readers have been so conditioned that they feel embarrassed to admit that they find it hard to stomach the work of a literary giant for fear it would betray their plebian taste. The fact is that a few read, and fewer enjoy, the novels of those who sit on the literary pedestal. We have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that a book with a story can't be quite in the same class as a book that leaves us to interpret what is unsaid.

How can there ever be a substitute for a book, which you can read in a bus, lying in your bed or sitting on a rock by the sea? A book allows you to explore your imagination as you interpret the author’s intention. A book offers us refined delights of being a part of something much bigger than ourselves. It gives us the purified exhilaration of nuances and undertone and equivocacy and contrariety; a book gives us imagination and imagination is happiness.

There are very few sights more off-putting than a woman's hands with corrugated layers of nail polish.

Listening to sublime music relieves you of thought; time comes to a stop; seconds, minutes, hours slide along into a continuum; you are suspended into an exalted world of disbelief.

A mass of mish-shapened flesh, weighing about two hundred and ninety five pounds, chuckled like a cockatoo. She had a kind of voice you could cut a piece of hardened cheese with.

The debate, throughout the eighties, was no longer about what we had inherited as our 'culture' or what, indeed, was the 'culture' we adhere to, but about how to root out the insidious 'foreign' (and therefore anti-Pakistan) elements which had crept in. Since it was feared that the slightest whiff from across the border would annihilate our 'ideology', the performing arts were confined to horse and cattle shows, and the fine arts, to calligraphy--at an official level that is.